11-02-2009

From the stone circles settlement of Wadi Gongoi the view towards north was awe inspiring. Images from the distant past are not only in the realm of rock art. Sometimes they are also in the landscape as it disclosed in front of us. I sighted the giraffes, the gazelles, the antelopes in the midst of time.

View toward north from the Wadi Gongoi stone circles settlement

Until a very recent past, life in Wadi Gongoi was not limited to some cluster of acacias or few bushes only. There were many wandering Barbary sheep quietly grazing in the shade of his rocky banks. We found horns and bones in every shelters.

A shelter in Wadi Gongoi.

We left Wadi Gongoi receiving from the sky goodness the blessing of some rain drops. We followed our way back to Cairo travelling along the large corridors of the Great Sand Sea. An easy going for the cars, a pleasant trip that after a while became quite boring. Whenever it was possible we choose to start our days moving by foot, preceding he cars and our Egyptian assistants, which were quite busy in the morning because of the usual operations necessary to dismantle the communal structures of our mobile camps. We were all equipped with PMR walkie-talkie. Thus, met the all safety requirements, we were free as the wind.

Walking "alone" in the midlle of the Great Sand Sea

Travelling by foot alone for ten kilometres every morning was the way we managed to escape from the sight of the vehicles, the high-tech cages that made our trip possible but too much artificial. To walk in the greatest of all sand sea without any other barrier towards the desert other than a good pair of boots and a T-shirt was very cool. What is the sense to cross by car such a beautiful desert without really experiencing it? OK, we know the true desert does not exist anymore because of the modern technology shrink all them to a senseless sequence of slides (or digital images). By walking we see the desert turned again to life. Eventually we concluded that the desert still exists!

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Gongoi Expedition. October-November 2009 - Back to Gongoi Project

 

10-01-2008

Flowers of the Archenu three (Maerua crassifolia)

The Western Desert of Egypt is not the Wadi-Sura-Foggini-Aqaba-Wadi-Abd-el-Malik circuit, the unfortunately worn track advertised by many tour operators as the master route to touch an untouched place, to land on an uncontaminated land or even to explore an unexplored desert. Very luckily there are still some small wadis in the Egyptian Sahara that nobody wish to visit simply because their are not listed on the Desert Explorer's Handbook. Apparently without importance, without anything to see, even not particularly spectacular in their GoogleEarth incarnation. Among the thousands of these apparently unsignificant places, after a long imaginative effort we selected just one that, was the famed Goran robber Arhemi Gongoi still alive, it could have been a perfect hide for him and his gang, i.e. we detected just another Zerzura to visit!

Here and there we found some special pixels on the satellite images making this wadi, easily nicknamed Wadi Gongoi, a place more interesting then many of the nearly identical wadis east and west of it. After long hours spent in studying the satellite data we felt in love with it; we liked the fact that an old fossil watherfall prevent 4x4 cars to enter. It is definetely safe from the package tourists. To put it in another way, Wadi Gongoi is a nice target for anybody craving for the unknown. It could be a silent place, a void place, a totally uninteresting wadi or may be a place were some stone circle of undeterminable age are there to make us dreaming about "Lost and Dead Worlds".